iBeacon technology has been around for a while now, but there is still a lot of confusion and misleading information about the concept in the media and public opinion. Let’s try to deconstruct a few of those and bring a little more light into the topic.

Myth 1 – Beacons track you

Beacons DO NOT TRACK you, your activity or personal details. Beacons are transmitter only devices that don’t receive or collect any information. All they do is just broadcast a preconfigured data packet several times a second containing a set of numbers. Mobile phones and apps running on them are in fact the ones that can detect beacons when in range and deliver contextually relevant experiences.

Myth 2 – Beacons deliver content

Beacons don’t transmit content, they just broadcast a set of unique parameters, thus enabling apps to provide proximity-relevant content to its users. The content that shows up on your smartphone’s screen comes not directly from the beacon, but usually from a back-end service that an app on your phone uses. Beacons’ broadcasts are simply used by apps on your phone to deliver tailored content – that might be information about the museum exhibit you are standing in front, or a coupon for an item on your shopping list, when in store. That is the reason beacons and iBeacon technology in particular to be considered a great enabler of proximity-related interactions.

Myth 3 – Beacons only work with iPhone

iBeacon is indeed an Apple trademark, however the underlying technology is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This simply means that any BLE enabled device – smartphone, tablet or laptop – and running at least iOS 7 or Android 4.3+ can detect beacons when in range. Furthermore, beacons are starting to show up everywhere, so expect to see them not only in Apple technology products, but also in wearables, home automation products, vehicles and more.

Myth 4 – Beacons drain phone batteries faster

Battery lifetime of your smartphone is not affected by beacons around you. True, in order to be able to detect iBeacon devices the Bluetooth on your smartphone must be on, so there is some energy lost. Remember however that iBeacon technology uses BLE, which is a very energy efficient version of Bluetooth so in reality there is a very minor battery loss.

Myth 5 – Beacons only work indoors

Although tooted as the indoor GPS, thus suggesting indoor only use cases, there is no limitation to where beacons can be placed. In fact more and more businesses realize that it’s the proximity aspect of the technology that matters most, not it’s ability to determine location.

Myth 6 – Beacons can be used to locate people and things with arbitrary accuracy

Figuring out correct location indoors is usually done via triangulation by estimating distance to several known sources. In iBeacon’s case unfortunately estimating distance is not very reliable. Using a very low powered signal means great battery life, but it also has its disadvantages. Beacons’ signals are easily reflected off surfaces, attenuated in people and objects and easily affected by environmental factors such as humidity and temperature. So in reality accuracy achieved by solely iBeacon powered indoor location services is usually in the range of 2-5 meters (6-15 feet) – good enough for general positioning but not nearly as impressive when better accuracy is needed.

Myth 7 – Beacons are useful in retail only

While the iBeacon technology has been often called the future of retail, its uses expand way beyond retail. These days brands are testing and implementing beacon powered solutions in airports, sport venues, museums, hotels, restaurants and more. The possibilities are limitless, as more and more people come up with ideas how to use iBeacon technology to power the next generation of proximity enabled experiences.

The unprecedented rise of iBeacon technology in the last few years has allowed more and more businesses to experiment and discover use cases for micro location and proximity engagement that were never possible before. While retail is the most popular area where the technology has been implemented with terrific results, there’s so much more about beacons. Let’s go through a few possibilities:

Retail and Malls. Retail outlets are quickly adopting beacons to provide customers with product information, flash sales or deals, and to speed up the checkout process. Beacons are a terrific way for store staff to easily identify specific customers, their needs and preferences and quickly link them with their digital activity.

Hotels. Beacons could provide a virtual concierge accessible from anywhere, or offer quick and painless check-in/check-out experience, provide information on amenities, or help vacationers explore points of interest in and around resorts.

Airports. Airlines and airports are testing placement of beacons at security lines so the airline’s apps would know if there are people at risk of missing their flight or missing connecting flights or whose gates have changed, helping them to easier navigate through the airport and get to the new gate faster.

Cultural experiences. As you walk around exhibits such as museums, zoos, aquariums, exhibitions, and galleries you can get more information on exhibits by interacting with beacons placed at each item. That would allow you to see relevant information, content or help navigate around with more ease.

Conference rooms and meeting venues. Through their own apps, conference centers could alert users about events that take place or broadcast schedules, resources, meetings in progress etc

Hospitals. Beacons could help broadcast information and guidance to patients or visitors when visiting, such as expected wait times or online registration forms in the emergency room.

Stadiums. Beacon technology is a great enhancer when sports venues need to better engage with fans. It drastically improves the experience for sports fans by using proximity sensors that allow sports lovers to gather exclusive offers, seat upgrades, promotions and other relevant information

Home automation. Beacons technology can give a boost to the smart home revolution by transforming your home, office, car or any place into regions and define what should happen when you enter or leave them. For example as you pull into the driveway, the driveway and footpath lights come on, or while entering your house, the lights and heating turn on etc.

DOWN TO THE NITTY GRITTY – Find below a list we compiled of the main use cases up to date in the industry

In retrospect not all beacon projects turned out successfully, however a great deal of them found ways to improve the customer experience, bring value to the end user and in the end to validate the technology. If there is one lesson to be learned, let it be this:

Always keep in mind what value you create for your customers’ when designing an iBeacon experience. iBeacon technology is an enabler and when used properly to enhance and improve it can become a great differentiating factor.

iBeacon technology currently registers an unprecedented rise, being an undeniable step forward for indoor positioning, micro-location marketing and proximity-based contextual information. The term iBeacon and beacon in general are often used interchangeably these days, due to the wide adoption of the iBeacon specification and the support by an industry giant such as Apple. Let’s explore what a beacon is and what have been the most important case studies to date.

What are beacons and how do they work?

A beacon is a device that broadcasts specific information at certain intervals, exactly like a lighthouse at sea. The underlying technologies can vary by manufacturer and use case, there are different wireless technologies used such as ZigBee and Bluetooth, and there are even beacons out there that use inaudible sonic waves to transmit information. What has lately become popular are beacons using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and implementing the Apple iBeacon specification.

Current generation of beacons are devices small enough to be attached to walls, counter-tops or even people, usually about the size of a hockey puck. By using BLE they are extremely power efficient with lifetimes ranging from months to years of constant uninterrupted operation. They can be powered by an internal battery, USB or mains powered when longer lifetime is required.

The beacon as a broadcaster on its own has pretty limited uses. In order to take full benefit one needs a specifically built receiver. Luckily we constantly carry such receivers in out pockets – the latest generations of smartphones are quite capable of picking up beacon broadcasts. On top of that current iPhones and Android powered smartphones can run apps that implement complex algorithms to make sense of beacon broadcasts and provide relevant information, indoor location guidance, on-demand intelligent assistance and access to relevant deals and coupons, to name a few uses.

So what makes a beacon an iBeacon?

According to the iBeacon specification guidance, in order for a device to be considered iBeacon compatible it needs to conform to several specific requirements:

iBeacon compliant devices are not connectable

A fundamental difference from all other similar technologies. An iBeacon device is an ambient information source and as such users need not connect to gain access to the data it exposes.

iBeacon compliant devices must broadcast their data in a very specific format

The advertisement packet being broadcasted contains several fields, namely UUID, Major, Minor and a signal power calibration value. All those fields are freely configurable by the beacon owner and can be used to encode different information based on use case. The first one (the UUID) is a globally unique identifier that can be thought of as application identifier. Usually all beacons deployed for the same use case share the UUID, thus making them easy to detect. Major and Minor fields can be used to differentiate between different beacons, or to provide more information to the detecting app, (for example Major can represent aisle or exhibit number). The signal power calibration value is a number used to estimate distance between receiver and beacon – something very useful for indoor positioning applications.

iBeacon compliant devices must be sufficiently responsive

The recommended broadcast rate is 10 times a second – a responsive beacon is a beacon that is reliable. The biggest problem with this requirement is of course battery life, for battery powered beacons, as a higher broadcast rate means more energy used which in turn results in a much lower battery expectancy. Manufacturers usually let this characteristics be configurable as it allows their customers to choose how to balance battery lifetime and responsiveness according to use case.

From a user point of view there are some considerations as well. The biggest one is that in order to be able to do anything interesting when beacons are around, a smartphone user needs to have an app installed on their phone that makes sense of the beacon broadcast. To further complicate things, Bluetooth must be enabled at all times and on iOS specifically a consent for the use of Location Services is needed from the user as iBeacon is part of Location Services. Although this may complicate the life of the average mobile app developer, all those measures are in place in order to ensure that the smartphone user has full control over the interaction and that their privacy is guaranteed. So the next time you receive a push notification, triggered by your presence in range of an iBeacon device, remember, you have full control! You can just disable Location Services for the offending app, or simply turn off Bluetooth and you can be certain that you won’t be pestered again.

In summary iBeacon technology has the power to change the way we interact with everything in our surroundings – from store displays to retail counters, ticket stands to museums and from vending machines that make your favourite coffee flavour to tailored experiences designed with your specific preference in mind. But most importantly, it’s a technology that puts all the control of the experience at your fingertips, in the device most of us keep very personal – our smartphones.

The BlueBar Beacon Long Range is available to preorder, shipping worldwide in early November 2014.

We are extremely proud to be sponsoring the RE.WORK Technology Summit, taking place in Berlin, Germany on 19-20 June. RE.WORK is all about emerging technologies and their positive impact on business and society and this year the inaugural Berlin Summit is taking place, with 50 speakers, 150 leading technologists and innovators, and a startup stage at the iconic Umweltforum in the heart of the startup community in Berlin. The event schedule is packed with great talks on topics such as Environmental monitoring, Energy, Robotics, Big Data and most importantly – the Internet of Things.

We will be showcasing iBeacon and mobile proximity technology and also making the event iBeacon enabled through Kontext – our very own mobile app, powered by our realtime beacon decision platform ProximitySense. We have taken great care developing the next generation event app that works seamlessly with iBeacon and helps bring the power of micro location and contextual awareness to event attendees. Kontext provides up to date event information, automatic check-ins to areas to increase networking potential and allows users to discover trending topics of conversations happening on Twitter with people around them.

Last but not least, we will be running a scavenger hunt game, using Kontext and powered by iBeacon devices, scattered at the event venue. Explore the venue and detect all beacons to win iBeacon development kits from us.

Kontext will be available shortly before the event both for iOS and Android. Reserve your place for RE.WORK today, as tickets are in very high demand.

A major vulnerability in the technology that powers encryption across much of the internet was discovered this week. Like many other teams, we took immediate action to investigate and patch the vulnerability in our infrastructure.

Though we have no evidence of malicious behaviour, we encourage you to change your account password not only on BlueSenseNetworks.com or ProximitySense.com, but everywhere, as many of the services you love were affected. This includes email providers, online bank services and online retailers. Please check with your existing services if they have been patched BEFORE changing your password, as doing it on an insecure server will expose you to the vulnerability

Shipping worldwide has been our goal from the start and shipping costs have always been a factor which we have tried to really focus our attention on. We know that shipping charges can be a big expense and a big turn-off when trying to get your hands on a flashy new BlueBar beacon and we have tried our best to drive them as low as possible.

We are based in the UK so shipping inland and to most of the EU is cheapest. Here is a comparison table with what the different zones and prices look like:

We are extremely proud to announce BlueBar Beacon – a standalone Bluetooth LE beacon device powered by a single coin-cell battery.

Development of the BlueBar Beacon took us a few months and several design iterations. Our goal was to quickly bring a device to market and still not compromise on power efficiency, certification availability and security.

Guided by those principles we developed our design around BlueGiga’s BLE113 Bluetooth Smart module – a fully integrated solution with CE, FCC, IC, Japan, and South Korea certifications. Its low power profile allows our device to run continuously on a single coin-cell battery for up to two years. The module supports adjustment of its transmit power in 16 steps and exposes several hardware interfaces. This let us concentrate our efforts on building a Bluetooth LE beacon firmware with all features necessary to develop applications that use the technology.

Key features of the BlueBar Beacon are as follows:
– Fully iBeacon technology compatible – tested and works with the iPhone (4S and later) as well as the iPad;
– Works with Android 4.3+ devices, that support Bluetooth Low Energy – using a 3rd party library;
– Denial of service and tamper proof firmware – uses an encrypted connection to setup and control the device;
– Allows all iBeacon parameters to be set and updated – UUID, Major and Minor;
– Allows signal power and advertisement frequency to be adjusted;
– Runs on a single CR2450 3V Lithium battery for up to two years;
– It is CE, FCC, IC, Japan, and South Korea certified;
– Fully RoHS compliant;

The BlueBar Beacon is currently available to order in two variations – as an integration kit and as an end-user device. The integration kits are starting to ship in January 2014, and the end-user variation is expected to ship in March 2014.

The Future is bright, it is interconnected, smart and energy friendly and most importantly – it is closer than you think!

We envision a world, where we are surrounded by smart devices, accessible at a whim to help, empower and guide us. We believe in a living Internet of Things – a network of connected devices and services that allow us to reach further than our grasp. This symbiotic relationship is currently being born, more and more the devices we carry are equipped with sensors that react to touch, voice, gestures or even eye movement. Our environment is also being enriched with smart devices, such as automatic doors, parking sensors, smart road lights and more. We believe those devices will only get smarter and more powerful and will start to react not only to our presence and physical characteristics but to our intents and the context of our actions.

There is however a missing piece in the interconnected world puzzle. As our phones get smarter and more powerful, we are still lacking the ability to interact freely with the physical world around us. The everyday objects are very slow to adopt the power of context, they still lack a technology to give meaning to their function. Our belief is that by creating a simple device that carries the missing context component and can be freely attached to anything we can empower people to do things beyond our imagination.

We assembled a team to address that need and Blue Sense Networks was born. We also built a device – a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon device. We have completed prototyping stage and we are in the process of commercializing it with the goal to make it available by the end of 2013.